I didn't make it to the AC Milan-Chelsea International Champions Cup match that was the first-ever event at U.S. Bank Stadium (which I want to call "ooo-sss-bahhhnk stadium") last night. I'm kind of pissed, to be honest, but I got blindsided.
For a couple times in the past three weeks up to last night I was looking at Stubhub, the website where I'm more frequently purchasing tickets in order to avoid dealing with scalpers. I had seen many tickets available there. They weren't great; they were in the upper level and they cost $55 including taxes and fees, way more than the base price of $40 in those sections. But there were plenty of them, and so, even though it was the first event ever there, I didn't think it was going to sell out.
Therefore I was at a crossroads: Do I buy online then or buy on the street later? If I do the former I take the risk of paying more for a ticket when there could be plenty more that scalpers would be offering at closer to face value, and for a guy who's not working now, I need to save as much as I can. If I do the latter, I run the risk of paying a lot more money after passing up so many seats.
In the end, I decided to take the risk and buy the day of. There were so many seats available, even on Ticketmaster, which I checked on Tuesday night, even though they were the crappy seats on the corners. I took the tour of the stadium during its open house a couple weeks ago and I figured that at worst I would pay as cheap as I could and stand in the upper-level concourse, which actually is a great vantage point to watch a game. And I trusted that I could use whatever scalper savvy I had to bargain down for a ticket that I thought was going to be available. In short, I felt like a stooge to take the sure thing when I knew I didn't have to.
Well hell, I guess I had to in retrospect. First of all, I heard from a spokesman on the news last night that the stadium would sell out, and that floored me. Then, as I was walking from the west side of downtown towards the east, it seemed like everybody was making a pilgrimage to the stadium. That stadium can seat a lot of people, but I still thought tickets were available. But then I realized I didn't see something: scalpers. Well, I saw one, and he was offering one ticket -- at $300, I think.
This can't be. So I fell back on my Plan B: Going to the library downtown and printing myself a ticket. I do want to get in, so if there were no scalpers, I figured that I would get back on Stubhub and buy one, assuming the prices didn't skyrocket.
Now, this is where things went sideways on me. I got on Stubhub. The multitude of tickets that were there narrowed all the way to three batches of tickets. Cheapest price: $125, and that's not including taxes and fees. This can't be! So I refreshed like the screen froze. Amazingly, the cheapest price went down to $115. I didn't know Stubhub had dynamic pricing. Plus I could instantly download the ticket, so I figured I'd buy one, print it out, and just walk to the stadium in time for the game to start. It's a hell of a lot more than $55 or even $60 I would have paid for if I bought it just the night before, but I could stomach the, oh, $125-130 for a memento ticket.
You need to register for an account to get a ticket on Stubhub. Then, when you want a ticket, they make you logon. And it took me three minutes before realizing I was putting in the wrong e-mail address. Stupid me, especially since I had used Stubhub last week to purchase Atlanta Braves tickets and I didn't idiotically use the wrong e-mail. When I finally corrected it, which was a bit after 8 p.m. (the match started at 8:30), all the tickets were sold. I want to think that even if I put in the correct e-mail address I would have been too late, but I think I'm thinking that to myself to make myself feel better.
I moseyed on back to the stadium to make one last-ditch effort, just in case all those tickets that were available less than 24 hours before and that were somehow sopped up in the hours since were for the taking on the street, and that the scalpers got in over their heads at a surprise ticket glut. Didn't work out that way; the other loiterers holding up one or two fingers demonstrated starkly that demand outstripped supply. There was one other dude there that had a ticket to sell, and he did not budge from $250. So shortly after the match kicked off, I kicked out.
Look, I just didn't think the game would suddenly sell out. A guy who works at the Nomad was also there, and he swore he would not buy a ticket for a friendly between AC Milan and Chelsea for $250, partially because he didn't think the price for a ticket like that would ever get that high. I still don't know how in the hell that happened. What, a bunch of supporters from England and Italy looked the prices of the tickets, said what the hell, and flew into the Twin Cities? About a hundred tickets on Ticketmaster and almost 500 tickets on Stubhub, all taken up in a matter of hours? No.
I'm disappointed, but not bitterly so. At the end of the day, you have to look in the mirror and be OK with what's looking back at you. You don't have to be happy, you just have to be able to live with yourself. And I can. I thought that my familiarity with the area (though not with the stadium) would help me and that tickets available the night before would still be available. Logic led me to decide what I decided. Nothing wrong with that. Now, I was wrong and I missed out on a landmark event (even though I heard that the concourses were sardine cans), but hey, I saved money. Still having money and my principles? Not the worst thing in the world.
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